Eternal Sonata Demo Impressions

Eternal Sonata is a RPG developed by Tri Crescendo and published by Bandai Namco. The game was released last year for the Xbox 360 to decent acclaim.Story

The demo offers no insight into the story at all, which is strange as a main element of an RPG is its story. I’m a little disappointed by this but it obvious the demo is meant to show off combat, rather than anything else.

Gameplay

Like I said, the demo centers around combat, and luckily for the game, combat is fun. There are a few things that go into combat for the game. There is a light/dark element that is the primary focus with an action gauge among others. You start a battle by running into an enemy you see on screen. From here you are brought to a combat zone with a number of monsters to defeat. The ground will either be sunny or covered in shadow and depending on where you are, the amount changes. Standing in the light or the dark gives you access to different abilities to fight enemies, as well as sometime changing enemies into more powerful forms. This mechanic works well and makes you aware where your enemies/where your characters are when fighting. As i mentioned earlier there is an action gauge. This gauge, from the moment you make any move will start counting down 5 seconds. These 5 seconds are the amount of time you have to attack, heal, what have you. The game also sports a “echoes” system which boils down to a combo system that increases the damage of special attacks.Graphics/Audio

The game has a very impressive cell shaded look that looks absolutely stunning in some areas. The character models are clear and sharp with the world having a beautiful anime feel. There isn’t much in the audio department for the demo, with no story dialogue and only a few song pieces. The voice acting is well acted as far from i can tell, if not a bit annoying with the standard battle dialogue. If anyone has ever played a few years old RPG, you know what I mean.

Conclusion:

Going into the demo, I didn’t really know what to expect. After playing I was pretty impressed with the graphics and combat of the game. As I said earlier I’m disappointed that there was no story revealed in the demo but from what I can tell, it seems worth a purchase.